If you could hand your children one skill, and only one, what would it be? Storytelling? It might be the single most useful thing a human being can do.

A first-time public consultation needs a single, experienced communications partner managing engagement from the start, not a form thrown online and a press release announcing it afterwards. Here is what to look for in a partner if this is the first major consultation your team has run.

audiences respond to defensiveness and euphemism far more negatively than they respond to an admission of fault. If people already know something went wrong, telling them it didn't, or that it wasn't that serious, doesn't reassure them. It irritates them.

A step-by-step guide to preparing police, council or public sector spokespeople for difficult media interviews, written from the journalist's side of the table.

People are very good at answering the question in front of them, and not nearly as good at telling you what they actually need. This is not a flaw in your residents or your service users. It is simply how human beings work.

There is a familiar instinct at the heart of most public debates, that if we present better facts, clearer evidence, and a more rigorous argument, people will change their minds and come to our way of thinking. It's wrong.

Human behaviour hasn’t changed nearly as much as our strategies assume. This creates a fundamental mismatch between how organisations communicate and how people actually receive our communications.